Investigating Local and Global Control Mechanisms in Bilingual Grammatical Processing

Bilinguals employ both global and local control mechanisms to manage coactivated languages that compete for selection, yet little is known about how they operate on morphosyntactic information. The current study investigated bilingual language control mechanisms for a morphosyntactic production task. Across two experiments, 48 early Spanish-English bilinguals completed rapid instructed task learning paradigms with priming-in-item-recognition manipulations that investigated the extent to which parallel activation was observed across languages and across rules of the same type within a language. The results from the current experiments showed that it was more difficult to reject incorrect responses in the correct target language than to reject incorrect responses that contained the correct grammatical manipulation executed in the nondesired language. These results suggest that global control at the level of target language selection is more effective than local control processes during a bilingual morphosyntactic manipulation.